Nairobi, December
16, 2013--Police in the semi-autonomous republic of Somaliland on
December 13 raided the Hargeisa offices of the critical independent daily Hubaal,
arrested two staff members, and ordered the publication to be shut down,
according to news reports. This is the third time the paper has been targeted
this year.

Police arrested four
journalists on December 3, 2013, and detained them for nearly a week for
covering a peaceful protest in the capital of the semi-autonomous republic of
Somaliland, according to local journalists and human rights organizations.

Nairobi, November
21, 2013--Somali authorities arrested two journalists, one of them the
victim of an alleged rape, on Wednesday in Mogadishu, the capital, and charged
them with defamation in connection with a report on the alleged rape, according
to news reports and local journalists.

Following CPJ's release of its report on
the state of press freedom in the United States, the organization is pursuing
high-level meetings with the White House. CPJ had drafted six recommendations that were shared with President Obama, including calling for
a guarantee that journalists would not be at legal risk or prosecuted for
receiving confidential and/or classified information.

CPJ continues to work toward
securing a meeting with the Obama administration in order to discuss the
report's findings.

"Given our 32-year
history fighting for press freedom around the world, we believe CPJ can make an
important contribution to the press freedom concerns and debate in the United
States," CPJ Chairman Sandy Rowe wrote in a
blog published the day after the report.

The young staff members of Radio Shabelle, whose
offices were in the relatively safe section of Mogadishu next to the airport,
are no longer feeling safe. On Saturday,
while presenters were on the air, heavily armed security forces raided the
Shabelle offices and arrested the three-dozen staff members at gunpoint,
according to a statement by the Shabelle Media
Network. The security forces
dismantled and took all of the equipment for Radio Shabelle and Sky-FM, a
sister station in the same building, as well as Shabelle TV.

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Nairobi, October 28,
2013--Journalist Mohamed Mohamud, commonly known as "Tima'ade," succumbed
to gunshot wounds on Saturday and died at Medina Hospital in the capital,
Mogadishu, local journalists told CPJ. Unidentified gunmen shot Mohamed, a
reporter for the popular, privately owned, U.K.-based Universal TV, on his way
to work on October 22 in the Wadajir district of Mogadishu.

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On the morning of Tuesday, October 22, 2013, Somali
television journalist Mohamed Mohamud, nicknamed "Tima'ade," was seriously
wounded when unknown armed men attacked him on his way home from work. He was
shot more than five times. Colleagues
and local residents in Wadajir district, where the attack took place, immediately
rushed him to Madina Hospital in Mogadishu.

Nairobi, October 22,
2013--Somali authorities must work quickly to identify the motive in today's
murder attempt on a broadcast reporter and bring the perpetrators to justice,
the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The journalist, Mohamed
Mohamud, has been hospitalized with serious injuries.

It could have been the script for a John Le
Carré intrigue. On Saturday October 12, Belgian security agents arrested Mohamed
Abdi Hassan, a kingpin of Somali piracy known as "Afweyne" (Big Mouth), and his
associate Mohammed M. Aden, nicknamed Tiiceey, a former governor of Himan and
Heeb province.